Get a gun, go into a muddy field, use foliage for toilet paper and emerge a man; this seems to be the point of the Officer Training Corps.
Whether you intend to have a career in the army or just have low self esteem and feel a uniform and a firearm will build confidence, the OTC will take you in.
To help inclusion, some of the cadets produce a bi-annual magazine called Slag Mag, which I found shocking for a number of reasons.
Their paragraphs were far too long, there were large areas of white space, and the caption on the picture of the man putting a bottle up his arse was justified right when throughout the magazine the captions had been justified left.
It’s disgraceful to see such sloppy journalism; it completely let down the riveting content of who had been shagging who and in which orifice.
If the real army got around with each other at the rate the OTC seem to, Al-Qaeda wouldn’t need road side bombs to drive us out of Afghanistan, they’d just need a particularly virulent strain of gonorrhea.
It does seem a bit unfair that various cadets have had their sex lives broadcast to the whole OTC, especially with rumour making up much of Slag Mag’s pages.
But then again, with only a millimetre thick piece of canvas between two people in coitus and the rest of the camp, keeping a weekend fling under wraps is always going to be tricky.
What does annoy me about the OTC’s fledgling swingers’ scene is the fact that government money is paying for them to be bussed around the country to copulate with each other.
Perhaps the Ministry of Defence should spend more money on armoured Land Rovers and less on sending randy undergraduates off to earn their ‘brown star’ on night time manoeuvres.
The graffiti on the outside of the OTC’s barracks says “Over-privileged Tory Cocks”. Putting aside the snideness, this does raise a question.
Is the OTC just a playground for ex-boarding school types who want to play soldiers? The fact a couple of Sheffield OTC instructors were caught doing cocaine last year can’t help their image of being a taxpayer funded social club.
Speaking to some OTC members, most say there is a small group of “posh tossers”, to use one cadet’s words. But they also say that most of the cadets are reasonably serious about the OTC, including many of the “posh” members.
A bit of jealousy comes into my criticism of the OTC. The only group I’m a member of is this paper and I spend a fair few hours a week cobbling pages together.
I don’t get paid £35 a day, nor do I get to fornicate with my fellow editors. The company in the Media Hub is always jovial and witty, but only the most dynamic of lotharios ever manages to get touchy-feely with their fellow Forge Press staff.
So I’ll never know the delights of the female OTC cadets, with their sexually suggestive nicknames. I won’t even get to have a witty nickname myself.
It is rather unfair that those who like to keep their personal lives private have them plastered across Slag Mag’s pages, but if they don’t want to feature on the “Shag map“ then they shouldn’t go around getting their end away on the tax payer’s time.